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4 October 2018

Essay: Making : memory by Lisa Sharp

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Making : memory

Rox De Luca,
Michele Elliot, Laurie Paine

Friday 5th October until Sunday 21st
October, 2018

In a Copenhagen
museum there lies a peat bog-mummified body of a woman, over two thousand years
old.[i]
She was found in 1879 lying curled up and fully clothed, just a metre below
ground level. Unaware of her great age, she was brought to the local doctor at
Ørum who had her body undressed, and all her clothing washed and dried in his
yard. Her name, her identity, any memories, all lost. Now known only as the
Huldremose Woman, for the place she was found, the Huldre Fen. She had lived,
loved and died in the Bronze Age, between 160 and 340 BCE. The textiles and
objects found with her, so extraordinarily well preserved, poignantly, though
not fluently narrate enough to evoke so much about this woman - her body, her
life, her self.

She wore a woollen
dress woven in a checked pattern. Made in 2 parts, the skirt was fastened
around her waist with a leather strap held in a woven waistband. A scarf, made
on a tubular loom, was pulled over her head and held in place under her arm
with a needle fashioned from a bird’s bone. The skirt was probably blue/green
and the scarf red. Over this she had on two sheepskin capes, an inner one worn
with the sheep fur facing her body and the outer one with the fur turned out.
The inner cape was a patchwork, assembled from 11 small dark brown lamb skins
stitched together. It was well worn, bearing 22 sewn patches. Stitched inside
one patch were a collection of objects; a fine bone comb, a narrow blue hair
band and a leather strap. As these objects were contained in a bladder and
stitched in, they must have been significant to her; amulets or charms perhaps.
Around her neck were 2 amber pearls strung on to a piece of wool thread and on
one of her fingers, the impression of a ring remains, worn at the time of her
death. She was about forty years old. Under her woollen dress she wore
underwear, a plant-based fabric of linen, nettle or hemp in a plain weave,
because as we know, wool, while warm, itches the skin.

There
is something very touching about these antique textiles, and their capacity to
hold and convey such intimate details of the woman who wore and perhaps made
and mended them. In many ways, the three artists of Making : Memory carry on the legacy of this unknown woman from
Huldremose; their works in the exhibition not only exploring the powerful
bodily attributes of cloth, particularly as worn clothing, but also continuing
even through disruption, a human legacy of textile traditions. For artists
working with cloth, clothing and textiles, weaving, collecting, sewing or
assembling, whether well or badly, for function or not, is to access knowledge
and techniques that have formed a collective, generational endeavour. Touching
cloth is an evocative and haptic experience; bringing forth deeply embedded
memories of self, family and community. Rituals around textiles recur in our
lives; we are wrapped and clothed and wrapped again between birth and death. ‘Cloth sheathes our bodies in a second skin:
swaddling us in cultural belonging.’[iii]

In
terms of making, the crafting and labour apparent are at once learnt skills as
well as meditative methods. And so, it is with a keen sense of their maker’s
hands on and in the material; holding, dying, gifting, stitching, keeping and
weaving cloth, collecting, sorting and assembling objects that pervades the
reading of these artworks as made memories, a comingling of collective as much
as individual histories.

Rox De
Luca’s works bring together a self-reflective exploration of a personal,
familial and cultural past through a site of intersection with the contemporary
moment of consumer-driven globalism. Tangible childhood memories hang from the
walls in physical form. Suspended from simple wire hangers is a collection of
worn but clearly cherished articles of clothing. Plaintive, evocative,
innocent, the clothes tell of a particular time – a Melbourne childhood of the
60s and 70s and more; of sisters, sharing clothes, thrift, motherhood, and a
father’s work. Accompanying the kept clothes, affectionately named Baby Dress, Cossie, Mama’s dress, The smock and MTA Coat are De Luca’s distinctive garlands of weathered plastics,
which she collects from Bondi Beach, later sifting and threading them on to
wire or string. These could be interpreted playfully, as colourful wreaths
given by the sea or with sinister menace, as manacles of waste products
disgorged by a polluted ocean. Either way, their careful arrangement and
display gives rise to a tension in the indexation of things. Here, discarded
rubbish found on the beach has been made lovely; collected and carefully
arranged by colour and size. There, lovingly cherished objects have been worn
and dulled by time, their seams fraying, colour fading, and age spots staining.
The value of the object and the action of art has caused it to sit on a sliding
scale, somewhere between fetishizing and aestheticizing.

While De
Luca’s colour palette appears at first glance to be an exercise in contrast, in
the context of her oeuvre, many of the pieces evoke the migrant diaspora
experience. Growing up as an Italian Australian, the red green and white flag
was for her a constant template for memories made in the new country. On
another reading, there is a wider diaspora of ocean crossings undertaken by
mass-manufactured plastics – and paired with the regulation green uniform of
the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority)
Coat the tendrils of red soya sauce caps sets up a dialogue about migration
and between ephemerality and permanence.

Michele
Elliot’s work, the lovers, is a
series of 7 separate textile pieces. Elliot works from the starting point of
discarded clothing, the everyday familiar of low-tech and commonplace things. A
critical distinction in the work though is their humble reception by Elliot as
gifts, rather than merely as found objects. Taking her needle and thread, she
stitches with awareness of the person whose body inhabited the garment. The
work is repetitive and time consuming; long lines of monochrome thread pierce
and run over the surface, the action of sewing transforming the object from a
utilitarian shirt into an undulating textile body. Pinned to the wall in a row,
their visual weight and verticality strongly suggest the moving body yet
curiously, equally resemble a hang of abstract paintings. It is as if painterly
gestures of colour, form and void have left the constraints of frame and
support in order to twist and writhe upon the white gallery walls. Somehow, the
process of hand sewing seems to have made the clothing more closely resemble
the bodies that wore them, as if they were indeed that second skin, that swaddling
in belonging.

While
the series references Magritte’s painting of the same title, in which a textile
barrier impedes an embrace between anonymous lovers, these lovers are
differentiated bodily actions, and the embrace is contained in the way they
embody the action of making. After all to mend a cloth is to love it. Indeed,
tender attributes are gently ascribed to each work in the naming - riviera, M, mountain, painter, meadow, protector, poet, in quiet acts of homage to the
givers; among them a goddaughter, a mother and a close friend.

At her
loom, Laurie Paine captures vignettes of everyday life, weaving slices of her
own history alongside observations on contemporaneity into the structure and
composition of her works. Made with wry humour the Social Security Suite is a suit of clothing - a hairshirt, flagellating
whip and crown of thorns woven out of letters from Centrelink. Rather than a community
of belonging, these missives depict the artist’s struggle to fit within a ‘one
size fits all’ collectivisation, her memory made physical by this studied
fashioning of a torture costume fringed with thorns and nails. In another
series, R.I.P., obsolete train
tickets are woven in to the fabric with fine silver threads over a black ground
cloth. Viewed from a distance, the everyday journeys fall into a larger
reference, of a cross or crossing, referencing the ongoing allure of travel.
This technique is repeated, but on a much more personal level with an Untitled series on pale linen. One in
particular holds a discreet memory; waxed paper straws from Paine’s
grandparents’ milk bar in Balmoral. The attempt to pin down these otherwise
disposable or transitory objects is haptic memory making; by embedding them
into the textile they become permanent memorials.

Some of
Paine’s most recent works are exhibited in the elegant Untitled trio of weavings on black silk with gold thread. She
recounts how these are a continuation of of an earlier body of work in which
she, unknown even to herself, was able to draw from early memories and
associations with textiles (her mother’s collection of cushions). Without
consciousness or deliberation she had figured her weaving with Palestinian
embroidery motifs, ‘stylized, and yet
still recognizable: a language that we recall but can no longer read.’[v]Years
later, she still uses this figuring and invents upon it, but now with
consciousness and deliberation. One of the weavings is an elegiac poem, made in
memory of her mother and culture.

‘Can’t
you see, I curl up, while I become too small for my skin, while

Making : Memory is an exhibition that gives voice to the
innate human activity of making as a means of accessing and exploring memory.
Rox De Luca, Michele Elliot and Laurie Paine are artists who have an eye to the
larger significance hidden in the everyday rituals, to the cycle of days where
we wake up, wash, clothe ourselves, eat, touch, cherish, love and lose. Taking
worn clothes and handled objects out of and back into the everyday through
their making (and re-making) as artworks in a gallery is a reverent and
transformative gesture. It is a gesture that enables not only a commentary on
pressing contemporary issues of migration, mass manufacture and the value of a
human life but also connects to a shared human memory of the warmth and beauty
of textiles. Alongside the Huldremose woman we still live in a time where these
cloths not only hold our bodies, they warm us and they identify us.

ArticulateUpstairs is a separate initiative within Articulate project space that usually runs an independent program, and is sometimes part of a project space program. It is the mezzanine space on the first floor of the Articulate building.